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ocdtrekkie

25,714 karma · joined March 24, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ocdtrekkie; my proof: https://keybase.io/ocdtrekkie/sigs/T7n-16gO4PALgw_6mFb1LGR0_EDhdOAa8AyXnmMYm88 ]

Feel free to contact me privately! email: me (at) ocdtrekkie.com mastodon: @ocdtrekkie@mastodon.social

I'm an IT consultant working for a private company in the Chicagoland area. My views are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. I have no financial interests in any major tech companies.

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ocdtrekkie··on FAA issues national ground stop – lifted 4.5 hours later
IT in corporate is actually more panicked than IT in life safety, because life safety invests more redundant design.
ocdtrekkie··on Service degradation on Microsoft 365
This usually isn't a software quality issue, it's overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment causing additional systems to fall over.
ocdtrekkie··on Smart home devices should work without the internet
Yeah app access can be handy, it just shouldn't be foundational to everyday use. If I want to change something remotely I wouldn't normally, apps are great. Each time my parents get their phone app out to turn on a light in the room they are in, I die a little inside.
ocdtrekkie··on Smart home devices should work without the internet
Insteon remains incredibly solid. The new company is super slow with new product because it's tiny, but the hardware remains incredibly good long-term. It doesn't clutter common wireless bands and by nature of being stupid, Insteon devices cannot really be hacked.

My rules for home automation are largely the same as the article, first and foremost the existing physical UX of switches and stuff should always work, and ideally automations should be nearly invisible: They should subtly be convenient and monitoring should be useful, but nobody should be confronted with a weird change of lifestyle because a house has automation. And nobody should ever need an app to use their house.

ocdtrekkie··on Person of Interest
Unfortunately it turns out that is because that is Jim Caviezel. He is apparently a QAnon wackadoo and during the filming of the show he constantly just wanted to do things that "seemed cool" even if they were not the action a hero would take or were entirely out of character.
ocdtrekkie··on Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
Don't remind the Googlers in the thread it exists! The only Google services unmolested by garbage are the Google services nobody remembers exists that still just like, live on the servers underneath everyone's attention. When you find some Google website with their 2010-style UI you know you've found one of the last remaining nuggets of gold.
ocdtrekkie··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
> Entrust (now Sectigo) is involved with this

This is probably a rough definition for "Entrust was banned from being a CA and sold the business off to a competitor". In part, because I also do not think the root programs would just allow Entrust to continue operating the same business under another brand name, unless they are even dumber than I already thought.

ocdtrekkie··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
I bet Entrust never made a cert with a private key of 4.

The problem is the death penalty case is aimed at the wrong target: The entire Web PKI system remains dumb and bad, and the correct answer is to dissolve the CA/B and find people with practical security experience.

ocdtrekkie··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
I defined success for myself quite a few years ago: I want to leave the world better than I found it. No high aspirations, no figure. Just better than it was.

Some of that is political advocacy. Some of that is open source code that should exist. Some of that is helping a neighbor. I don't need to hit a certain bar, I just need to know that in a given interaction or situation, I am trying to make things... at least a little better.

That also scales well to differing life decisions. The video game I'm playing, can I get people to play a little nicer with each other and have more fun? Workplaces are full of dumb stuff, success is making it at least a little better. Turns out I have kids now. Wasn't the plan, but now my obligation is to make sure my involvement in their lives is positive. Not a specific bar I have to achieve, but you know, someday I hope someone appreciates how I chose to live my life.

ocdtrekkie··on Open-source Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications
> support hotline

Have you... ever tried talking to Microsoft support?

ocdtrekkie··on Open-source Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications
Entra ID is separate if you don't want logins from Nigeria. One of the most insane-to-me things is Office 365 is basically "open access by default" and you have to pay $6/month/user to fix it. Most people don't realize just how much attack surface they open up moving their data to the cloud, and that it costs a lot to even start to get back towards a secure environment like you had on-premise.

But yeah, the lock-in effect is huge. Microsoft cloud products deliberately don't work well with anything but more of their own cloud products. And as soon as you start a migration to it based on what you need, you suddenly realize how much other stuff you also need to pay them for. And you can't escape without replacing all of it.

ocdtrekkie··on Open-source Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications
Yeah though FWIW, the overall impact of companies realizing maybe they shouldn't be spending $100k a year on a document editor is likely to raise all boats for alternatives.

It remains really wild people think Office is worth $30/month/user. Anything that erodes that belief is a net positive.

ocdtrekkie··on Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027
Indeed, and they control the CA/B Forum. The last CA to express an independent and reasonable view got booted from being a trusted CA.
ocdtrekkie··on Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027
Well, that is the nature of security theater. Busywork and process fragility with no or negative benefit.

In the past a long-lived EV certificate changing was notable/interesting from a security standpoint. Short-lived certificates just mean anyone who can break into your domain registrar (easy) can create an identical certificate and none of your key storage or security matters.

ocdtrekkie··on Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027
It will merely mean any given legitimate certificate is indistinguishable from a newly minted malicious one.
ocdtrekkie··on Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027
Because the people on the CA/B Forum is doing security theater and doesn't have a practical view of security risks. But the tech companies that employ them view them as authorities and won't fire them for promoting dumb ideas.

The CA/B is the embodiment of the phrase "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

ocdtrekkie··on Show HN: gtlds.fyi – All the proposed new gTLDs
In theory it can be shorter. Imagine good.cooking is shorter than goodcooking.com

But every one of these plays with all sorts of collisions of user expectations. "word.cloud.microsoft" is one of those URLs that will never look right to me, but is now a corporate staple.

ocdtrekkie··on ShinyHunters Extorted Boeing Spin-Off Prior to Arrests
I think more modern security is an "emperor has no clothes" situation than people think. The LLMs are gonna have a field day.
ocdtrekkie··on Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort
They probably will be the one going through their parents stuff and hopefully by the time its an issue can move it to their kids' place. Options for trusted free hosting are limited sometimes. ;)
ocdtrekkie··on Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort
100% everything here. That level of tamper evidence should be good enough for the reasonable individual, IMHO.

On the enterprise scale, the question I think everyone should be asking is: Do they have LTO tapes on a shelf? Fundamentally the same issue (but larger), in terms of needing to ensure it's physically separate, and secure, and tamper evident. =)

Anything in the cloud or connected to your network can be hacked. The backup of last resort must be on a shelf.

ocdtrekkie··on The Tao of Backup
If you think this is historical, you have a lot to learn about production servers in the wild! =)

Just as a not-insignificant portion of the world still relies on a handful of ancient AS/400 systems, a pretty big portion of society depends on the good running of hand-configured Windows Server.

ocdtrekkie··on So you think you could be an electrician?
This is true in tech as well. Big Tech folks with figuratively infinite budgets believe they're all that, but they basically are incapable of understanding the day to day problems small organizations face, or develop the ability to jump between completely different fields of technical problems several times a day.

Larger organizations come with more specialization and greater resources, but you will never find a jack of all trades there.

ocdtrekkie··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
If they solely look for and record sightings of specific plates associated with active investigations? Not a lot, no.

The core problem with Flock is that it tracks innocent citizens on the off chance it helps catch a criminal, when it could be designed to only track already known wanted vehicles.

ocdtrekkie··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
There is a meaningful value in catching stolen vehicles and child abductors. Not high enough to justify capturing every single plate, but there's a value.

Bear in mind this is not meaningfully different than previous mechanisms of issuing BOLOs. Law enforcement widely distributes information about plates of interest. In my area, those plates are often on digital billboards already.

ocdtrekkie··on Celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney donated to him as a teenager
Well the average kidney transplant works for 15-20 years... so probably not.
ocdtrekkie··on NTSB Preliminary Report: Prime Air 767 Runway Overrun [pdf]
Yeah that stood out to me too. It feels like they should be putting veteran pilots with newer ones so that you gain experience while having it in the cockpit already.
ocdtrekkie··on StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta
I've been on iOS for like seven years and have never done this. But... hey, it works!
ocdtrekkie··on StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta
Yeah, dismissing a question I don't see an answer for right now easily is the worst. I think swiping the app closed is the easiest way out.
ocdtrekkie··on I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
Entra has already had vulnerabilities where a user in one tenant could access global admin of every other tenant. Somehow everyone didn't immediately move off Microsoft's cloud platforms.
ocdtrekkie··on I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
Physical security vendors usually stop exactly there. I can't count how many vendors responsible for badge systems shut off the Windows Firewall just because it’s easier than adding a rule.
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